Monday, December 19, 2011

Symantec Still Selling Huawei Equipment - to the Dept of Defense

A November 17, 2011 article in Channelnomics states that "Symantec may have ended its experiment as a hardware manufacturer by selling its stake in its joint venture with Huawei Technologies, but Big Yellow remains committed to developing appliance-based backup solutions and will continue to contract with Huawei and Huawei Symantec as a hardware supplier (emphasis added). In a letter to partners, North America channel chief Randy Cochran says the contract manufacturing relationship between Symantec and Huawei will remain unaffected, as will Symantec’s commitment to marketing and developing appliance-based solutions."

So one of the world's largest security companies continues to partner with the very Chinese company that most of Symantec's customers are buying their systems to protect against. That displays a level of hypocrisy that I have no tolerance for.

Even worse, as General James Cartwright and others in the U.S. government rail against China, the Department of Defense, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and CSC are all buying Huawei Symantec hardware according to one Huawei Symantec channel partner that I spoke with privately. If Rep. Rogers makes good on his promise to hold hearings on Huawei and ZTE, I hope that he investigates who in the U.S. government and the Defense Industrial Base are buying Huawei Symantec products, which are all made by Huawei in China.

1 comment:

To put things mildly, I don't think you can make a strong case that "most of Symantec's customers" are buying their systems to protect against Huawei. Your intolerance seems to be misplaced as there is no hypocrisy demonstrated here. Tell us exactly who in the US Government is both buying Huawei hardware from Symantec and at the same time condemning Huawei, and then you'll have your hypocrite; but not until then. In the comments section of your "Why I Oppose the 12 Chinese Hacker Groups" post (Dec. 21 2011, comment on Jan. 5 2012), you are pretty critical of people who tend to make China the "sole bad guy in the universe of cyber threat actors," or at least people who you judge to have a vested interest in doing so (Incidentally, in that same post you are also critical of people who demonstrate a lack of analytic rigor and who fail to demonstrate evidence for their clams). But painting Huawei as a cyber threat actor feeds exactly that frenzy. There are many reasons to be skeptical of both Huawei and China, but you seem a bit conflicted in how you justify your skepticism of both the company and the country.